The first round was with a peer based in North America. They opened with some common project questions — what was the hardest part, and how I solved it.
Then there was a coding question, a variant of a LeetCode problem. They gave a string and a width. The first part was to split the whole string into lines of that width, then add a suffix to each line saying which line number it is out of the total — something like 1/8, 2/8. The follow-up was: what if the suffix length also has to count toward the width? Since the suffix length varies, if you process the string line by line you don't know the total number of lines yet. I still don't know how to solve this to this day. I didn't get it, but the interviewer passed me anyway.
The second round interviewer was based in Beijing.
They opened with a project deep dive that went a full 40 minutes, and they dug really deep — what the data was, which team I worked with, whether I led anyone, how I built the metrics, and what the final results were. Then, in the last ten minutes, there was a system design question about a flash-sale system, asking how to solve the core problem of grabbing tickets. The last 5 minutes was a coding question, a match-three "candy crush"-style problem — I ran out of time to write it, so I just talked through my approach. I thought I'd done well, but I ended up getting rejected.
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